Limited movie runs

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, March 1, 2007

TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER

Imagine the Cisco Kid dropped in a Sergio Leone western, reworked by Douglas Sirk on the set of a pop-art stage production of "Oklahoma!" and scored with Thai pop songs. When it was first released in Thailand in 2000, Wisit Sasanatieng's new-wave Western, shot on video in birthday-cake colors, was the defining film of the new Thai cinema. The wave has long since crashed, and "Tears" is less a vanguard of a national cinema than a unique, exuberantly excessive cult piece. It's not performed so much as posed, with a strapping but impassive peasant lad turned legendary bandit letting his stage tears do his emoting as his childhood sweetheart is married off to an ambitious cop. It has a tendency to overextend its outrageous arias, but this pop-art confection both spoofs and celebrates the crazy conventions of movie melodramas and genre cinema with pure affection. (Sean Axmaker)

GRADE: B+

At Varsity through Thursday. In Thai with English subtitles. 110 minutes. No rating, features overwrought scenes of unreal violence and fake blood.

THE AURA

Argentinean director Fabian Bielinksy died last year on the verge of a promising career. "The Aura," his second and final film, leaves behind the snappy cleverness of his debut "Nine Queens" for a hypnotic take on the heist film. Ricardo Darín plays a morose taxidermist with epileptic fits (the "aura" of the title is his description of an oncoming attack) obsessed with studying crimes and concocting heist scenarios. When he stumbles onto an impending armored car holdup, he steps into the lead role as if it were a puzzle, and he pieces it together on the fly. But for all his meticulous attention to details, he's completely unprepared for the unpredictable human element. It's less a deconstruction of the heist film than an ambitious contemplation of our fascination with the genre, directed with a dispassionate eye at a ruminative pace and centered by a queasily emotionless figure wading through a swamp of moral ambiguity. (Sean Axmaker)

GRADE: B

At Northwest Film Forum through Thursday. In Spanish with English subtitles. 129 minutes. No rating, features scenes of violence.